Three Princes

Vyasa was a sage, not a courtier, and he made no pretence otherwise. He had lived in forests and eaten what the forest gave, and he wore that life on him — wild-haired, fierce-eyed, weathered, smelling of woodsmoke and earth. When his mother asked him to father the dynasty’s heirs, he agreed, but warned her honestly: the queens would have to endure his strangeness for one night without flinching, and a child takes the imprint of the hour it is made in. Satyavati, anxious for the line, told the queens only to be brave and said nothing of what they must be brave about.

The elder widow, Ambika, went to him first. When the sage came to her in the dark of the chamber she could not bear the sight of him, and she shut her eyes and held them shut through the whole of it. Her son was born magnificent — broad, strong, royal in every limb and feature — but his eyes had taken the imprint of hers, and he came into the world blind. They named him Dhritarashtra, and by the unbending law of kings a man who cannot see cannot hold the throne, however else fit he is for it. It was the first injury, and no one had committed it on purpose, which is exactly the kind of injury this story is most interested in.

Satyavati then sent the younger widow, Ambalika. She did not close her eyes, but she went bloodless with fear and stayed pale through the whole night. Her son was born sound in body and clear in mind — but he carried that fear’s pallor in his skin from birth, and so was named Pandu, the pale one. He could see, he could rule, and so the throne, when it came to be decided, would come to him rather than to his blind elder brother. The second wound was opened in the same chamber as the first: the elder set aside, the younger raised, for a reason neither of them chose.

Satyavati, wanting one heir without a flaw to point to, asked Ambika to return to the sage. Ambika could not face him a second time. She dressed her own maidservant in the queen’s robes and jewels and sent her instead. The servant-woman was not afraid. She received Vyasa with composure, with courtesy, even with kindness, and the sage, moved by being met at last without dread, blessed her: her son would be free of every defect and would be the wisest and most upright man of his time. That son was Vidura. But he was the child of a servant, and so, by the same iron law that barred the blind man, he was barred from the throne forever — fit to rule above all of them, and permitted to rule none of them.

Three boys, then, were raised together in Hastinapura under Bhishma’s hand and Satyavati’s eye. Dhritarashtra: eldest, blind, and never for a day able to forget that the crown had passed him by for a reason he was born with and could not mend. Pandu: whole, gifted in arms, and so made king. Vidura: clearest-sighted of the three in every sense that the throne did not measure, and so made the king’s counsellor — the man whose lot, for the rest of the epic, would be to say the true thing in rooms crowded with men saying the convenient one, and to be heard and not heeded.

See the pattern the story is already laying down with such patience. The throne does not once pass cleanly. It is held by a man who has vowed never to sit on it, populated by a sage out of the forest, and finally settled on the younger of two brothers because the elder cannot see. None of this is a crime, precisely. But a particular wound has been opened here and left unclosed — the eldest was passed over — and two generations on it will be reopened with very nearly the same words, by men who feel its old ache in their own blood, and that second time no one will be able to close it before it has taken everyone down with it.